Coffee heat rising

Workplace issues

What a day!

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Well, it’s almost tomorrow, so I’m gunna write this tonight (Wednesday), let it post tomorrow, and take a day off from scribbling to continue the various gardening projects.

Back from choir a little after 9, a cloud cover blown in on the nighttime air and a very light sprinkle starting to spit. Naturally, Cassie the Corgi was not wrung out after her 6:00 p.m. dinner, so grabbed an umbrella and the leash and set out for a late evening constitutional.

Driving home I’d seen some lightning off in the distant east but didn’t think much of it. The day was clear as a proverbial bell and I didn’t expect any rain would blow in. As we reached the apogee of our stroll the sprinkle began to come a little harder (Cassie hates rain!). We’re about as far as we usually get from the house when a big bolt of lightning C-R-A-A-C-K-s out of the sky with a clap of thunder bold enough to knock you off your feet! It was really close, certainly this side of the mountains a mile to the north.

Holy Mackerel! And there we are with a fine metal-ribbed umbrella in our paws!

We sprinted for the house, dog and human at a dead run (did you know you can run pretty well in Danskos?) and just reached the eaves over the front door as water began to pour out of the sky.

So that was a rousing end to another trying day.

Up at 3:00 a.m. worrying about the COBRA and money. If because of a bureaucratic screw-up my termination date goes into the system after December 31, am I going to lose out on the ARRAS discount? If so, then I can’t afford to buy ASU’s health insurance, and because of the ominous stress attack that landed me in the ER for a day because it so cleverly mimicked a heart attack, there’s no chance I can buy insurance on the private market. Though I have enough cash in my checking account, even after sending my excess savings off to the financial dudes for 2009 and 2010 Roth contributions, that money is earmarked for me to live on, not for some insurance company to rip off. If I spend it on $600 or $700 premiums over the next five months, there won’t be enough for me to live on without drawing down several thousand dollars from the IRA, exactly what we’re trying to avoid in an effort to recover the losses of the past 18 months or so.

And speaking of retirement funds, what about the $500 from the Fidelity 403(b) that now is not going to show up this month, thanks to yet another screw-up on the part of my beloved former employer? When I sent that cash off to the Roth, I’d figured on getting the drawdown and using it to help fund my January/February budget. How the hell am I going to get by without that five hundred bucks?

And speaking of the enforced drawdown from the 403(b), the one mandated so that the state will cough up the $19,000 of unpaid sick leave (RASL) it owes me, if those idiots screwed up entering my termination date in the state’s system, that means the ornery RASL lady also thinks I’m still on the payroll. That means she’s not processing my RASL application. And that means an even longer delay in stumbling through that procedure. The longer it takes her to do that, the longer I’ll have to take a drawdown, and the longer it will be before I can move the 403(b) money over to my financial managers, who just now are doing a great deal better with the big IRA than Fidelity is with the 403(b) funds.

{moan!} Got up, wrote the post you may have read Wednesday, dorked around online for a while, wrote a list of things to do. Went back to bed just before dawn. Got up again around 8:30 or 9:00. Sat down at the desk and got back on the phone.

First I called the Department of Administration again, reaching a new CSR. Explained the story again. She opened the payroll system while she was on the phone and said I was still shown as employed at ASU.

I said HR Lady claimed there was a “delay in the payroll system” and she intended to get in touch with DOA on Thursday. That would be tomorrow.

DOA Lady said she didn’t know about that, but she repeated that the HR system shows me as not terminated. She then remarked that DOA has no direct contact with ASU’s HR department. “They never call us on the phone,” said she.

No. Of course not. Why am I not surprised?

Eventually, I called my former husband, a corporate lawyer, to ask what he thought I should do about this, if he could suggest any regulatory recourse, and if he could refer me to a labor lawyer.

He said he didn’t know much about that sort of thing, but he did give me the name of a guy in town, a man whose name I recognized as a fellow with a reputation as a heavy hitter. Then, on reflection, Ex-DH observed that the university’s present general counsel is one of his former law partners. He suggested I should get in touch with that gentleman, since the business with the COBRA is a federal issue that could pose a fairly serious problem for ASU.

I said I doubted if he would remember me. He said maybe not, but he certainly would remember Ex-DH. I should call, remind him that I’m Ex-DH’s former wife, and tell him what is going on. Given that it’s extremely unlikely I could get past the gatekeepers in the general counsel’s office, we agreed I should try e-mailing him.

Meanwhile, Ex-DH suggested, I should e-mail and snail-mail a history of this to someone at ASU and someone at ADOA, so as to get it in writing (again!) that I was supposed to be terminated as of December 31. He said that time is now an issue.

Oh, God.

So I spent about an hour boiling the story down into as brief a form as possible, without all the flourishes one finds in blog copy and without the expressions of distress, annoyance, and cajoling one emits around the HR functionaries. Then I spent another hour writing a short history of the COBRA fiasco. This I addressed to HR Lady and cc’ed to Dean Debby (former supervisor) and the college’s Business Office Manager, adding that I hoped to see the mess cleared up within 24 hours. This little tome took BOM’s name in vain, when, among other things, I reported that during the November retiree meeting we were asked to attend, we were told to ask our departmental BOM to submit a “retire employee” request through the manager self-service system, no later than the last pay period, and that BOM had accordingly done exactly that.

Time passed. I went up to Home Depot to buy some compost and manure, the better to cultiver mon jardin. Then I spent what little remained of the afternoon pruning the roses in back and digging the fresh dirt into the soil around them, weeding the vegetables, and giving them some of the smelly new dirt, too. Along about 5:00 I remembered that tonight was choir rehearsal and realized I’d better wash the eau de cow coprolite off before leaving the house. Raced to draw a bath and toss some dog food down. Checked the e-mail while I was running around: nary a word from General Counsel.

Suspicions confirmed: university lawyers are not friends to university peons, not even if the peons are ex-wives of ex-partners. But…

Comes 5:30 p.m., my hair is wet and the bathtub is draining and the dog is running around and I’m freezing, wrapped in a damp towel, because of course it’s darned cold in here with no heat on, the phone rings and there’s HR Lady!

She’s calling, she says brightly, to let me know that ADOA finally does have my termination in its system (isn’t that great!). She will, she says, send me written confirmation of this tomorrow, but she thought I’d like to know it tonight.

Indeed.

Well, say I, what about the $200 I was supposed to have paid to COBRA by December 8, while I actually was still very much on the payroll and was still paying into the state health insurance system? (That would be the payment you never heard of, the one you said I shouldn’t have had to pay anyway…)

She will try to find out about that and report the results tomorrow, too.

Huh. Imagine that.

I figure either Dean Debby or General Counsel lit a fire under HR, given that HR Lady said she wouldn’t even get to my little problem before tomorrow. It’ ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Do they have me as terminated on December 31? Or will they decide that I died departed today, January 13, since that would have been the date the late great exit was entered in their system?

Will they refuse to enroll me in COBRA until I pony up the 200 bucks they demanded last month, which I forgot about in the confusion and general anguish that went on over the past several weeks?  And if they demand that I pay that, will they also demand another couple hundred bucks for the January premium, bringing the total gouge to an unmanageable $400?

If so, where will I get the $400, since I had to pay $200 for the late great pool maintenance?

Thank God for choir. Rehearsal was challenging, as it involved a rather dramatic piece in Latin (oh, don’t we love DRAMA? 🙄 ) that I had never heard before. We got a new second alto, conveniently pushing the retired priest’s wife into the seat next to me. This lady has a good voice: she can carry a tune, she sings on key, and she sings loud enough to hear her. That’s all I need to fake success. So it was fairly easy for me to figure out the new music. And the mental workout went a long way toward taking my mind off the current spate of GDU hassle.

What a day. What a place.

Storm image: FIR002, flagstaffotos.com.au Lightning strike, January 2007
Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
Please note that this image is not in the public domain and must be used and acknowledged accordingly.

Trying to escape from flypaper

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Getting quit of Arizona State University and the State of Arizona is like trying to pull yourself free of a giant sheet of heavy-duty, extra-sticky flypaper. Below, notes on this morning’s exchanges with a Fidelity 403(b) rep, a Department of Administration rep, and (god help me) another ASU Human Resources rep:

Called Fidelity to find out where the $500 payment is. Reached L— S—.

She said there are two funds, one with $159,000 and a smaller one. She asked which one I wanted to withdraw from. I said I had no idea, having been through several reps, all of whom said they would make this happen.

She said the smaller one is available for any drawdown from me. The larger one requires paperwork proving that I no longer work for the state university system and approval.

She said they did receive the 8-page form from ASU but it is in process at Fidelity. She will e-mail the person in that department and call me back to report what’s going on.

Meanwhile, I haven’t received a bill from COBRA. Called ADOA. Reached a woman who didn’t identify herself. She said

a) I was supposed to have sent a check to HITS (how appropriate!) and I have not. I looked in my notes and discovered I was supposed to have sent a $199.14 check and, in my endless confusion over this f***ing nightmare, failed to do so. But this would not matter, because…

b) ASU has not entered me in the HRIS system, and so as far as ADOA is concerned, I am still employed by ASU and still covered.

LS said I need to call HR again and do battle with them. I have to tell them to enter me in HRIS and then find out from them what date they show me terminated. Then I have to call ADOA back and tell them what the date is. Then they will figure out what to do about COBRA.

I called C— D— at HR. She said I am entered in HRIS as terminated. I said ADOA said I was not entered.

She was mystified about the COBRA prepayment due in December. I said that was what ADOA told me, and that I had failed to make the payment because I was overwhelmed by the paperwork and hoop-jumping, which has now accrued a two-inch thick binder of paperwork and notes. She said there is no such payment; that she couldn’t speak for ADOA but she knows the system, and they have to send me a bill for any amounts owed. I said what I told her was what they  told me. Twice.

CD said the termination went into the system on January 6, and it usually takes about 24 hours for it to register. She also said that because I wasn’t canned until the 31st, several days in to the first January pay period, I would have been covered by ASU’s regular plan until the 10th. I pointed out that today is January 12, and so presumably I now have no insurance coverage.

She said well, do I have any health issues? I said I need to go to the dentist. She asked if I have an appointment today.

I said, “Look. I have to get in my car and drive from one end of Hell to the other today. If I get in an accident and end up in the hospital without coverage, I will be bankrupted!”

She said COBRA has a six-month period in which you can enroll, so if I get hurt or sick in that period I can retroactively enroll.

She offered to call ADOA and tell them I was “termed” in their system six days ago and to find out what the story is with the COBRA. I said I will be running around the city all day—I’m now over an hour late in getting started and haven’t even had breakfast!—so she said she would find out what she can and leave word on my voicemail.

Will this horror show never stop????

Freedom!

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w00t! I’m never going back to work at GDU again. Over at the community college, the last of the student papers are graded, and all that remains is to meet one class this afternoon to return their papers. I’m waiting till this evening to post grades, because there’s still a shot my marvelously brilliant but distracted Asperger’s student will turn in a final draft (I gave a couple of foot-draggers until today to finish).

LOL! This kid is so amazing that even if I grade from the work-in-progress he turned in by way of proving that he is working on it, he’ll finish with a strong B.

Moving on: by this evening, I am going to be free of any sort of slave labor (except for copyediting another detective novel….heh heh heh heh!) for an ENTIRE MONTH.

Yesh.

I had forgotten how lovely winter breaks and summer vacations are. The only thing hanging over my head between now and the middle of January will be designing next semester’s courses. And I’m actually looking forward to that, because I have some highly creative new ideas.

Springing free from the Great Desert University is an enormous relief. One of the other things I’d lost sight of is how toxic that place is. I do not know one soul who works there who is happy in her or his job. At least one therapist in the city has a practice that consists almost entirely of GDU employees.

Imagine: a shrink who specializes in treating employees of a single organization. Does that tell you something, or does that tell you something?

427px-Guerin_Morpheus&Iris1811

The god of Sleep has returned to my precincts. I’m sleeping through almost every night undisturbed! It’s literally been years since I’ve had a full night’s sleep, one that wasn’t interrupted by a spate of wakefulness between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. Matter of fact, that was the genesis of Funny about Money: nothin’ else to do in the wee hours but read blog posts and write a few of my own.

And since, for the first time since the memory of Person runneth not to the contrary, I feel rested when I wake up in the morning, I’m not irritable and on edge all day, I feel no desire for a drink every afternoon, and navigating our homicidal streets no longer reduces  me to screaming rage.

Do I worry about money? A little. But I know I’ll get by at least through 2010. By this time next year, I should be well accustomed to living on a third of what I earned at GDU, and if that’s the case, I can go along forever on Social Security, part-time teaching, editing, and a very small drawdown (if any!) from savings.

Yesterday’s guest post by Revanche struck a chord, when she remarked on her surprise at realizing how much she revels in freedom from the workplace. Right on, lady!

I think a lot of wage slaves who trudge into an office, factory, or retail store stay on the gerbil wheel for one reason and one reason only: health insurance. It certainly was true for me: shortly after I divorced I realized that once the COBRA ran out (my ex- covered that, as part of the agreement), I would be uninsured and unable to afford my own insurance. That mooted the prospect of freelancing, which, in my financial naïveté at the time, I imagined would support me. Several times during my tenure at GDU, I thought I should quit the damn job and go back to freelance writing and editing, but the reality was that I could not get insurance to cover me fully and even if I could, nothing was affordable.

Insurers dream up every reason from Hell to short you on coverage. In my case, I was told  that because I had a “diagnosis” that I had never heard of—something a doctor had innocently noted on my record but thought so minor he didn’t bother to tell me about it—Blue Cross would not cover any broken bones, back pain, or muscle spasms. This meant that a good car wreck would bankrupt me. And good car wrecks are commonplace around here. In any event, the cost was prohibitive. If I wanted to be able to go to a doctor, I had to keep working for GDU. Which of course was what was sending me to doctors…

Starting in January, the discounted COBRA will carry me through to Medicare. Though Medicare costs about 11 times more than GDU’s EPO does, it still is not beyond reason. The state of Arizona’s health insurance is so cheap (and you get what you pay for, BTW) that it far underprices what most Americans pay for group insurance, and so Medicare probably looks like a bargain for most folks.

Once government-provided health insurance is in place (if it ever gets past the retrograde types who are resisting it), I wonder what effect that will have on the labor force.

I suspect a lot of people figure they could get by with self-employment or in part-time jobs, but keep trudging because they can’t afford health insurance and are unwilling to go bare. How many workers who dream of jumping off the treadmill will do it, once that barrier falls?

I know I would have left GDU a long time ago if affordable public insurance had been an option. Why would anyone put herself through a lifetime of misery if there were a reasonable way to get out of it?

Maybe this is the reason the right-wingers oppose a public option: they know darned well the more self-starting wage slaves will flee if we don’t have to stay in the traces to get medical care when we’re sick.

What’s freedom worth to you? If you had access to decent, affordable health insurance and you could earn enough to cover your living costs on your own or through light part-time work, would you quit your full-time job—even if it meant cutting back on your lifestyle a bit?

Image: Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Morpheus and Iris. Public Domain.

Gone!

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The coop is flown!

I’m free.

Yes.

I quit. I’m gone. Out the door, never to return. A bird that has flown the coop.

Last night, after I finally finished the latest iteration of the Index from the Black Lagoon, I mailed the damn thing off with an e-mail to our client editor letting him know I’m taking my 350 unused vacation hours, starting TODAY. That will carry me through to the end of the month, all the way to Canning Day.

And what a fine send-off that was! It was the worst episode of overwork I’ve been through since the days of La Morona, a.k.a. My Bartleby. Truly. I’ve been working from 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning deep into the evening, literally until I could not work any more, every day for the past four or five days. Those are eighteen-hour days. Most of that time was spent writing an index—truly a brain-numbing job—and undoing a screw-up of Herculean proportions in (naturally!) an essay that is long enough to stand as a monograph in its own right.

Yes, on top of the screwed-up index that had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, someone took it into his or her mind to set acres of direct quotation in italic. Why? Because it’s in Latin. We italicize foreign languages. Don’t we?

Well, no. Not always. Not in this case.

The flicking article occupies 148 typeset pages.

When our client editor saw the page proofs, he realized something looked odd but didn’t realize the author had it right in the first place: set roman. His response was to ask that we remove all the quotation marks.

After I had gone through 148 pages marking hundreds of deletions, I realized that couldn’t possibly be right: the guy was indicating direct quotes from primary sources. Belatedly, I drag out Chicago and find all that Latin material should have been set in roman type. That’s when, ever so much more belatedly, it occurs to  me to check the original MS, where I found that Author had it right, and someone on our end—probably the new editor in the sponsor’s office—changed it.

So now I had to go back through the 148 brain-boggling pages, STET all the quotes, and mark all the italic roman.

You can imagine how pleased our graphic designer was when I showed up at his door and dumped this mess on his desk. Ours was the third fiasco to enter his life that morning, and I presented myself at around 9:30. He grabbed the great wad of paper, waved it in the air, and demanded to know “Whose idea is it to publish a book as an article???!??”

Not  mine, of that you can be sure.

From there it was on to the index, 33 endless pages of entries and subentries parsing the most arcane subject matter you can imagine.

I really don’t enjoy indexing. This particular annual is difficult to index, because it not only is arcane, it’s dense. Every page has three or four entries, at least. By the time we reach the indexing stage, I’ve read the copy, which can be excruciatingly detailed, several times. And I Do. Not. Want. To. Read. It. Again. So I have to force myself to do this job, which under the best of circumstances takes about five to seven days.

Stupefied with short-termer’s syndrome, I plotted to foist about half the job onto my R.A. The book consists of discrete articles, and so I gave her several that did not overlap (so I thought) with the ones I kept for myself to work on. She wrote her entries; I wrote mine; then I merged the files.

Bad mistake.

First, the two chunks of copy in fact did have some overlapping content. In some cases, we described that content in different terms, so a subject was indexed in two places under two descriptive headings. And second, this young Ph.D. knows next to nothing about Renaissance and medieval history. This makes it difficult to recognize the names of major figures. Or, for that matter, some of the currents of thought and controversy that were BFDs then, but are lost and long forgotten today.

And finally, the aging editor forgets that young people conceive and map out research strategies differently from the way those of us who came up with hard copy do. They think in Boolean terms. A search is something that you do in Google or in a library database, not in an index or a drawer full of index cards. While there are some similarities, there are also some fundamental differences. And those differences are HUGE. The result: an index designed by a younger mind looks different and is different from one built by a survivor of the Cretaceous.

Ultimately, the only help for it was to throw out everything the kid did and start over. Basically, I ended up doing all the work I should’ve done in the first place, and then some. Quite a lot of some.

When I finally hit “Send” about 7:30 last night and realized it was the last thing I’ll ever have to do for GDU, it felt like a loud shrieking squeal had suddenly stopped.

You know how it feels when a migraine ends? Your head doesn’t hurt any more, but there’s a kind of residual echo of the pain? Like that.

My office is empty. Sometime between now and the 31st, I’ll have to go back to campus to return the College’s laptop and turn in the keys. Probably there’ll be one more frustrating runaround with HR. And that is it.

I hope never to have to set foot on the campus of the Great Desert University again.

Image:

Toby Hudson, Domestic Rock Pigeons in Flight, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

No end in sight…

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So, I had this fantasy that I’d be done with the last of my GDU work before Thanksgiving and would use my 350 hours of unused vacation time to take the rest of the year off. Nice thought, eh?

Ah, how quickly fantasy morphs to horror! Both of the two projects that were supposed to end my tenure with that place have burst out of their cocoons and revealed themselves to be GIGANTIC CLAWING SCREAMING SLAVERING MONSTERS!!!!!!!

I’m doomed. I will never be free of GDU. It will kill me before I break loose.

More later: it’s off to campus to put in another 10-hour day. Enjoyed the 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. shift no end; now can hardly wait for the next stint.

😯

Perfectionism: Is it perfect?

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J. D. Roth holds forth on the subject of perfectionism, which he suggests is “the enemy of the good.” The point he makes, which is well taken, is that you can waste enormous amounts of time and ruin your health in the pursuit of perfection.

True, to a degree. I have a friend who, having burned out in a high-stress altruistic occupation, decided to apprentice himself to become a carpenter. He was very talented, but he never got anything done because everything had to be EXACTLY perfect. My ex- and I gave him cash to build a dining-room breakfront for us…we never saw either the furniture or the money again. And Friend never did become a master carpenter. He ended up going back to riding herd on juvenile delinquents.

On the other hand, my own experience is that if you set your target too low, you never come up to your full potential. When I was a young thing in college, I discovered that if I would compromise by doing what other people wanted me to do instead of what I set myself to do, I could perform quite well at the lesser tasks that were set for me, with very little effort. The perfectionistic bent I had cultivated as a youngster was, it developed, unnecessary. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from a backwater state university (instead of Berkeley, where I’d spent my high-school years preparing to go), with a pointless degree that suited me for nothing other than marriage to a man of the sort my parents felt I should marry. Although the grades looked great and the man was a six-figure earner and a decent husband, I never did get to do what I wanted to do with my life.

In the workplace, where mediocrity is the standard, few people will notice that you do anything perfectly (except to resent you for it). They will notice when it takes you forever to get things done, though. You’re better off to do a good job without sweating perfection. If you fail to keep your own standards up, you’ll eventually fall short of your personal goals, and you’ll find yourself performing at the same lackluster pace as the rest of the herd.

The discovery that nothing has to be perfect can lead you to waste as much time as you would in pursuit of the ideal.

Once you realize you don’t really have to do your best in order to get by—or indeed, to generate spectacular annual performance reviews at the office—you stop trying to do your best. You devote your creativity to getting the job done with the least amount of work possible, and that can backfire on you. If you haven’t done an adequate job, sooner or later you’ll either face the consequences that occur when an important issue has been missed or you’ll have to do the whole darned thing over again.

Case in point: Recently I fobbed half of a large project onto one of my young pups, figuring she could do it as well as anyone. While she knows little about the subject matter, she’s technically skilled and I expected she would do “good enough.” I did the other half, hurriedly because it’s a job I dislike that requires a full week of dreary, mind-numbing plodding. Reveling in short-timer’s syndrome, I just wanted to get the damn thing off my desk and walk out the door with the keys locked inside the office.

The result was a study in mediocrity. And—no surprise!—our client editor noticed. Now he’s demanding fix after fix after ditzy time-consuming fix. Tomorrow I’ll have to spend the entire day in the office cleaning up the mess, and if that doesn’t satisfy him, I may actually have to toss the entire thing and start over! That will happen just as 40 ten-page papers come in from my students—400 pages of drivel to read in the few days before final grades are due. I’ve already spent way more time on this job than I should have, and we’re now a week late against the deadline we set for going to the printer. By the time we’re done, we’ll be two weeks late.

A little perfectionism goes a long way…